


(you make me) strong

by icantbe



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: AU, Augustus!Harry, Don't hate me x, Hazel!Louis, M/M, Sozz, The Fault in Our Stars - AU, The fault in our stars, enjoy, larry stylinson - Freeform, people die
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 07:08:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icantbe/pseuds/icantbe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis Tomlinson, 17, is (miraculously) alive thanks to an experimental drug that is keeping his thyroid cancer in check. In an effort to get him to have a life (he withdrew from school at 13), his parents insist he attend a support group at a local church, which Louis characterizes in an older-than-his-years voice as a "rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness." Despite Louis' reluctant presence, it's at the support group that he meets Harry Styles, a former basketball player who has lost a leg to cancer. The connection is instant, and a (doomed) romance blossoms. There is a road trip—Harry, whose greatest fear is not of death but that his life won't amount to anything, uses his "Genie Foundation" wish to take Louis to Amsterdam to meet the author of his favorite book. Come to think of it, Harry is pretty damn hot. So maybe there's not a new formula at work so much as a forming love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(you make me) strong

**Author's Note:**

> all credits for the book go to John Green, (for most of this will be practically the book itself.)  
> and all credits for the characters go to themselves.  
> I hope it's somewhat enjoyable.  
> enjoy .x

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group. This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness.  
Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.  
I noticed this because Nick, the Support Group Leader and only person over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ’s very sacred heart.  
So here’s how it went in God’s heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Nick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story—how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancerfilled past, slowly working his way toward a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.  
AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!  
Then we introduced ourselves: I’m Louis, I’d say when they’d get to me. Seventeen. Thyroid, diagnosed at age 13. And I’m doing slightly better than usual this day.  
The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Zayn, a chiseled-jawed, skinny guy with flippy black hair swept over one eye usually. And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. Isaac and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he’d glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I’d shake my head microscopically and exhale in response.  
-  
So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Harry Styles, I tried my very, total best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with my mom.  
Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”  
Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”  
Me: “Please just let me watch my show. It’s an activity.”  
Mom: “Television is a passivity.”  
Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.”  
Mom: “Louis, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”  
Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”  
Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.”  
Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.”  
Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.”  
Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.”  
Mom: “Louis, you deserve a life.”  
That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the definition of life.  
-  
Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time.  
“Do you want me to carry it in for you?”  
“No, it’s fine,” I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and I had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me.  
It delivered two liters of oxygen to me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited in my nostrils. The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.  
“I love you,” she said as I got out.  
“You too, Mom. See you at six.”  
“Make friends!” she said through the rolled-down window as I walked away. I didn’t want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days kind of activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and poured some lemonade into a Dixie cup and then turned around.  
A boy was staring at me.  
I was quite sure I’d never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Brown hair, curly and shaggy. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans. I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn’t even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this terrible haircut with an always messy fringe, and I hadn’t even bothered to, like, brush it.  
His eyes were still on me. It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.  
I walked into the circle and sat down next to Zayn, two seats away from the boy. I glanced again. He was still watching me.  
Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.  
I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and the guy was still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.  
Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked him over as Nick acknowledged for the thousandth time his ball-lessness etc., and soon it was a staring contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his blue eyes glanced away. When he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win.  
He shrugged. Nick continued and then finally it was time for the introductions. “Zayn, perhaps you’d like to go first today. I know you’re facing a challenging time.”  
“Yeah,” Zayn said. “I’m Zayn. I’m seventeen. And it’s looking like I have to get surgery in a couple weeks, after which I’ll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean, being blind does sort of suck. My girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Harry.” He nodded toward the boy, who now had a name. “So, yeah,” Zayn continued. He was looking at his hands, which he’d folded into each other like the top of a tepee. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”  
“We’re here for you, Zayn,” Nick said. “Let Zayn hear it, guys.”  
-  
There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Harry Styles,” he said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here today at Isaac’s request.”  
“And how are you feeling?” asked Nick.  
“Oh, I’m grand.” Harry Styles smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”  
When it was my turn, I said, “My name is Louis. I’m seventeen. Thyroid with mets in my lungs. I’m okay.”  
I looked over, and he was staring at me again.


End file.
